Morning Wrap: Wire Tap Wedge In AAP; PDP MLAs Want Afzal Guru Remains

NEW DELHI, INDIA - FEBRUARY 16: AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal with Prashant Bhushan at a press conference in New Delhi on Saturday. (Photo by Parveen Negi/India Today Group/Getty Images)

Morning Wrap is HuffPost India's selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers.

Main News

Barely a month after a historic election mandate, the Aam Aadmi Party seems riven by internal party discord and wire taps. The AAP, says The Indian Express, secretly recorded a telephonic conversation with a journalist that is now being used to build a case against senior party functionary, Yogendra Yadav.
The Centre and the Reserve Bank of India signed an agreement last month under which the central bank will, formally, prioritise controlling inflation above the other objectives of the monetary policy such as interest rates and the foreign exchange rate. Under this new agreement, the RBI has to explain to the government if it cannot rein in inflation over an agreed timeframe.
After acknowledging Pakistan and cross-border militants for their "help," the day-old PDP government stirred its second row when eight of its MLAs put out a statement seeking the return of the mortal remains of Afzal Guru, hanged in February 2013 for his role in the 2001 Parliament attacks and buried in Tihar jail.
Deepening the saffron tinge to contemporary Indian thought, the human resource development ministry appointed Baldev Sharma, former editor of RSS mouthpiece Panchjanya, as chairperson of the National Book Trust. Sharma replaces Malayalam writer A. Sethumadhavan, who resigned on February 25 on "personal" reasons six months before his term was to end.
The Congress has undertaken a massive organisational overhaul, with party President Sonia Gandhi appointing five new Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) chiefs. The appointments, which are a precursor to the All-India Congress Committee (AICC) reshuffle next month, carry a clear imprint of party Vice-President Rahul Gandhi, who is expected to take charge in April.
Does cab-hailing service Ola's acquisition of smaller rival TaxiForSure signal the beginning of consolidation among India's cash-rich-profit-starved internet-retail companies?
Though India is known for its skewed sex ratio, new numbers from the Census reveal that married women outnumber such men in India. This indicates the extent of women in polygamous marriages as well as the overseas migration of married men.
No stranger to controversy, AIMIM MLA Akbaruddin Owaisi took a jibe at the RSS on Monday afternoon calling it a “bachelors’ club’’ which has no right to tell Hindu women to produce more children

Off The Front Page

Over 200 Pakistanis were confined to a plane for eight hours, with inadequate access to food, at Delhi's international airport after their flight was diverted from Lahore due to a technical fault.
Taking a cue from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's pitch for energy-efficient LED bulbs for homes and street lighting in 100 cities, Home Minister Rajnath Singh has decided to replace all the floodlights on the volatile India-Pakistan international border with LEDs.
Beef lovers in Maharashtra will now have to do without the red meat as President Pranab Mukherjee has given his assent to the Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Bill, 1995, nearly 19 years after the Maharashtra Assembly passed the Bill during the BJP-Shiv Sena rule in 1995. Any sale of beef will now invoke significant fines and jail terms.
The Rajasthan government said that nearly 40% of the criminal cases filed in the past one year in the state were fake and may have contributed to showing inflated crime rates during the previous Congress regime.
Following on Budget-day moves to trace money more efficiently, transactions that exceed Rs 5000 in a five star hotel will now have to be settled using credit cards, says India's finance secretary.

Essential HuffPost

More than two years after brutally raping and murdering a 23-year-old girl in a moving bus, the driver of the vehicle, Mukesh Singh, remains defiant and unrepentant. In bizarre comments made from a prison where he is held, he has blamed the girl, known to most Indians as 'Nirbhaya', for being outside home at a "late" hour, and holds her responsible for the gruesome incident.

Amrita Chowdhury explains when hacking can be moral, permissible or downright evil.

Opinion

Ajai Shukla says in The Business Standard, that India's defence budget is poorly planned and strategic demands ought to determine procurement priorities, for it to be more effective
Praveen Swami, in The Indian Express, cautions Narendra Modi that in engaging Pakistan, it is more prudent for him to secure modest gains than hunt for primetime public-relations opportunities.